


Hello (Goodbye) Godfather Death

by 99BottlesOfBeerOnTheWall



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, DnD mechanics and divinity, Gen, Introspection, Near Death Experiences, Philosophy, Potentially triggering, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death, Whump, dreams and visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/99BottlesOfBeerOnTheWall/pseuds/99BottlesOfBeerOnTheWall
Summary: On the bed is a boy. His disheveled coppery hair is scattered on the pillow, and he has dark smudges of exhaustion under his eyes. He’s dressed in something white, sterile, and impersonal, and there are padded cuffs buckled tight around his wrists and ankles.“Hallo.” He rasps faintly.“Hello.” The Champion says back.In which Vax and Bren have many meetings, and discuss exactly why.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 120





	Hello (Goodbye) Godfather Death

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a huge CONTENT WARNING attached. The entire premise revolves around Bren’s multiple suicide attempts, and subsequent interviews with Vax’ildan Champion of the Raven Queen, Matron of Death. This includes mentions of attempted drowning, depictions of attempted suicide by slitting wrists and jumping from a tall building, as well as depictions of dying in battle. 
> 
> While there is no permanent character death, the idea of dying, and philosophy about death is still the central theme of the story. Please be careful! Don’t trigger yourself. 
> 
> I was inspired by another fic (I can’t remember the name, but I love you boo, and your fic was amazing) where Bren meets Vax’ildan after trying to kill himself and they have a loosely Divine to Worshiper conversation. It kept sticking in my head, and eventually I felt the need to explore it further. This is the result, and I think ended up going to a much more dark, mystic, and dreamlike place than the fic that inspired me. Please go try to find it, and give the author some love, it was a really beautiful story.

The Champion finds it meditative to watch the threads. If he were using Smaller words he would say it looks like a spiders web, or a vast hall full of people, or a night sky full of twinkling stars that move. But Inner concepts are truly inadequate, and he doesn’t use them. The weave isn’t like anything, it just is...Everything.

And in the Everything, a life is flickering out. The thread winks and flashes, like a guttering candle flame, and the Champion looks towards it. Someone young. Their thread isn’t long, and the Potential Futures before it are numerous: many choices ahead. Only the early passers look like that. With so much Possibility this passing is clearly preventable. But what makes it strange is how.

When he looks forward to the next division, it’s his own thread that has the power to curb the bridge, to pull this life back. He hasn’t seen his own thread in Time. (A long time, by the estimation of the measurements he used to use, an eternity and nothing at all to his Outer Understanding). Yet there it is. Their threads converge. There will be a choice here.

But why would he make that? The Matron does not condone perverting deaths. She does not call them fated, she does not demand that every potential passing come to fruition. But prolonging life not livable, undoing the end, is not what should be. It is an abomination to her. Why would he change a fate? His own meddling in such things is done.

It’s when he looks forward, that he sees the reason. It’s so far ahead, such a small chance, as the exponent of Potentials increases the farther away he looks. But it’s there. This thread has the potential in great distances, to affect many that are yet far off. There’s a cascading mass of Connections in the far distant forward, so misty and remote he can hardly make it out. Yet it’s there. A host of threads will have nothing to change their fate and prolong their life, if this one binding thread is snapped.

That’s why he makes the choice.

The thread is tensing, it’s gold turning dull, the moment is upon them. The Champion cocks his head to the side, he smiles faintly, he reaches forward, wraps a finger and thumb around its line, he pulls. And turns his attention Inward.

The moment he’s drawn to is a dark room. Everything around the edges is hazy, like a washed out painting, getting blurrier the farther out from their nexus point. The frozen image of a candle illuminates the edge of a bedside table. It’s blade of flame is completely immobile, like a tissue paper cutout, but the Champion is used to that. Singular moments of reality turned Little are all he can fit inside of. This one looks like some sort of medical ward.

On the bed is the only other completely clear thing in the room, knife edged compared to the muted distance of everything else. A sick boy. He looks like a teenager, maybe just edging into early twenties. The scruff on his jaw is patchy like someone not quite capable of a beard yet, and the uneven stubble grows unchecked. His disheveled coppery hair is scattered and matted on the pillow, and he has dark smudges of exhaustion under his eyes. He’s dressed in something as white, sterile, and impersonal as the bed, and there are padded cuffs buckled tight around the wrists and ankles of his Inner Form.

Then he looks up, piercing blue eyes fixing on the Champion’s graceful figure perched on the headboard above him.

“ _Hallo_.” He rasps faintly.

“Hello.” The Champion says back. When he leans forward, the candle’s stationary flame casts shadows from his un-manifested wings, which slide like a puppet show across the wall behind him. The boy watches the shadows move, but he doesn’t seem afraid. Or surprised, or happy, or much of anything really. He’s as dispassionate as the Champion himself.

“What are you?” The boy asks.

“A Manumission from choices” The Champion answers, with what is probably more honesty than this boy with only his knowledge of the Inside can understand. “One of many.”

“Death?”

“That is one word you travelers call it.”

“You don’t call yourself that?”

“What you know as death is nothing but a doorway. All roads go though it.”

“You’re prettier than I thought _Gevatter Tod_ was supposed to be.”

Vax laughs, the shadow from his wings shifting again. A hank of silky hair, black as ink, topples forward from how his head dips, trailing over the unlit side of his face. His laughter is light and indulgent, and cold as a starlit winter evening, no humor in the chuckling.

“I don’t care,” the boy says, closing his eyes wearily. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No it doesn’t” The Champion agrees.

The boy’s face crumples, eyes screwed shut. And for that moment he looks like a hurting child, trying desperately not to cry. In the stretching silence the Champion takes another look around the dark hospital ward, seeing nothing newer than before, but searching all the same.

“How did you come here?” Vax asks, in a gentler voice.

“I’m so tired.” The boy says instead of answering. His blue eyes open, and they’re hot with tears, as bright and empty as sky-blue glass. “I did it on purpose.” He whispers, his confession scalding the air like hissing steam. “They think it was an accident, but it wasn’t. I wanted to.”

The Champion cocks his head, alert and bird-like, and doesn’t answer. Perching on the bedpost, as his black hair drapes like a curtain, he just waits. More will come if he’s still, and it does, like this boy has been aching to tell it.

“I pushed myself in.” He says, voice labored like he can’t get his words out fast enough. “They weren’t watching, and I knew the ice wouldn’t let me up once I was in. So I jumped. I wanted to jump. I wanted to. I wanted.” He’s panting now, licking his lips again and again, still mouthing those words “ _I wanted. I wanted. I wanted_.”

“Hush.” Vax says soothingly. The Champion reaches down to caress a hot, dry cheek beneath his fingers. “I know what you wanted.”

“They think I don’t see anything. That I’m broken.” The boy says. “They’re right.” He chokes on nothing, the distress in his throat too dry to be a sob. “I’m nothing at all inside. I can’t tell anyone.”

“Shhh.” The Champion chides with an indulgent smile, still ghosting fingers over the boys freckled face. He glides a cold white hand across the boy’s hot forehead, thumb brushing at its furrowed lines, and the boy shudders underneath him, wide eyes gazing up at him pleadingly.

“Please. You have to listen to me.” He sobs. “You’re the only one that can hear me. All my words are gone there. You have to listen. You have to listen.”

“I’m listening, child.” Vax says. “You’re the one calling me here.”

The boy is just weeping hopelessly.

“Tell me your griefs, little one.” Vax invites warmth curling around the extended kindness. “The Matron always listens.”

The boy closes his eyes again, taking a shuddering breath before he speaks. “I hate him.” He finally begins, voice returning to its hiss of revealing secrets. His eyes open and he looks unblinkingly up into the Champion’s face hovering over him. “I want to hurt him. He taught me how to do that. I could make him bleed for me.”

Vax sweeps the boy’s hair off his forehead, listening dispassionately.

“That’s what I do. I hurt. I hurt...” the boy’s voice wobbles and vanishes while he blinks and licks his lips again. “I want to hurt. I deserve it, you know. To hurt. But They won’t let me. They take it away when I try, and I—I can’t keep going. I’m too weak. It’s so hard.”

Vax listens.

“I want to burn everything. I should—I shouldn’t. It’s evil. The evil inside of me. But it’s. It felt so good. I felt so good. It felt so good when I did it, when I let them go, and—and—and—“ He chokes on a sob again.

And listens.

“I can’t find myself. I’m all gone to pieces inside. I don’t know where—I don’t know. I don’t—I lost it. It’s all in the fog now. And I can’t feel. Can’t feel. I can’t feel anything. I don’t feel _anything_.”

The boy thrashes against his restraints with sudden vehemence, thumping his head back against the pillow, and the Champion watches him with a meaningless smile. He’s sobbing, huge gasping breaths that truncate his words, while he crumbles.

“Please make me feel. I don’t care. Just fix it. Fix me. Fix—Please—I don’t care. You can hurt me, I don’t care, just make me feel it. I need—Please hurt me. _Please_ —“

“Hush.” Vax says, stroking his hand across the boy’s forehead again, as his confession unravels.

He goes quiet. Breathing wet and harsh, trembling in his restraints, but soothed once more.

“I am not here to claim you.” The Champion declares when he’s calm.

The boy thrashes upwards, a protest already rising to his lips, as the hot tears burn his empty eyes again.

“I know what it is you want.” The Champion interrupts, and Vax runs a cold hand over his forehead again. “It is your right to have it. All mortals do.” He shakes his head again. “But it is not your time yet. A time. Not Time. I do not want that loss for you. Not yet...”

Beneath him the boy is weeping silently now. The tears of someone who can’t stop, but knows their cries will not change anything. Who has no more use for pleas or begging for mercy, and only weeps because they must.

“But I have heard you.” Vax promises, wings and shadows and face all looming over the boy beneath him with tender possession. “Your wrongs are not forgotten. I witness these, little one.”

The boy sighs like a fatigued child, and his eyes slip closed, shoulders uncoiling.

“You’ll remember?” He asks, when he finally opens his eyes again, looking up at Vax hopefully.

“Yes.” Vax promises. The Champion smiles coldly, and lays a hand across the boy’s cooling forehead one last time. “I’ll always remember.”

And he recedes. His frozen glimpse of the Innermost vanishes away. The boy falls asleep, his fever breaks, and the gossamer fragility of his life twinkles on.

***

The thread winks, sputtering on the edge of extinguishing, and Vax already knows with a pain in his chest who it is. The lifeline is on the edge of snapping, a wild flicker that flashes and dims like the rapid beat of a humming bird, then slows, and falters, and turns sluggish, until its hardly sparking at all. The Champion reaches for it, pinching a cold thumb and forefinger around the thread. Then he pulls.

And he’s inside the folds of it. He’s looking down on a small room, bare and white, with hardly anything in it. A plain cot that sits in one corner is the only thing of note. He’s perched on the sill of a barred window that only shows marbled white behind it, and sourceless light shines through it casting a shadow of invisible wings across the floor.

Where they stretch out over the stones, the boy is lying, in his nondescript uniform, pooled in his own blood. Arterial sprays of it arc up the walls, and mutilate his body, until he looks like an injured prey animal. The source are two jagged gouges, drawn from wrist to elbow, so deep that bones and tendons are exposed. Lying fallen from the hand too weak to grasp it, is a small pocket knife.

The boy makes a weak, floundering attempt at movement as soon as he sees Vax sitting over him.

“ _Ja! Mein Schnitter! Ich wollte, dass du es bist_.” He babbles, only managing to fumble one arm in the Champion’s direction, so it almost touches the dark foot hanging down inside the window.

“Little one, what did you do?”

The boy kicks again petulantly, managing to move little more than his shoulders. He’s older than when the Champion last saw him. The beard looks full now, a matted thatch that completely covers his cheeks and mouth. His hair is unkempt and rough, unevenly cut or picked ragged, and the shadows on his face are deeper. The empty glass eyes have fractures behind them, meeting the Champion’s gaze with a wild light.  
  
“I told you it did not have to be Time.” The Champion says reproachfully.

“I can’t.” The boy whimpers, his broken voice pitchy with a wail behind it. “I can’t. It hurts. I’m so empty.”

“I can’t ignore the part you play.” The Champion counters, with the defensive exasperation of trying to reason with a toddler. “I do not want what you ask me to do.”

“No!” The boy almost shrieks, hysterical strength giving him the momentum to seize The Champion’s boot. “No! No! I need you. You listen! You’ll hear. You hear. Remember...”

Vax seizes the hand clinging to him, before its fading strength can slip off, holding the blood spattered fingers in his own.

“I dream! I dream all the time!” The boy chatters, as if he expects the Champion to fade away before he can say it all. “I’m always going back. I keep hearing them scream, and it’s my fault, my fault. My _fault_.”

Tenderly, Vax holds the pitiful, trembling fingers, and leans farther down to trail his fingertips over the cold, clammy brow that he soothed once before.

“He’s so cruel” The boy stammers on, eyes fixed on the Champion’s white face. “He lets me bleed for hours. Just puts more, and more, and _more_. I can feel them moving, when I’m listening. He makes them eat me.”

His eye flutter shut, and he finally sobs, wet and punishing in the bottom of his chest. The Champion turns his head, cocking it to one side, and listens with glittering black eyes.

“They don’t even look at me anymore. I haven’t talked in so long. They just leave me. For hours—Days—Weeks—Months—Years.” He’s just chanting now, glass eyes fixed on the Champion’s face but unseeing. “They’ll all leave me forever. I’m all gone now. It’s empty. I fell apart you know? I lost all the pieces...”

Vax strokes the nerveless hand in his grasp.

“I go away sometimes.” The boy confides, wide eyed and breathless from all his talking. “I don’t know where I go. It swallows me I think, and then nothing exists anymore. I don’t want to leave, but it eats me.” He shudders, and his fingers tremble. “It scares me. Dying like that.”

The boy turns his head toward the foot hanging near his face, and his bloodless fingers give another frantic wrench around the hand supporting his own.

“I wish you would end it.” He rasps faintly, a voice given to hopeless longing.

“My child, there are Futures at stake.” The Champion says, gentle but unyielding. “I do not wish to do this.”

The boy just grimaces like he’s trying not to cry again, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“I will not lie, what you want is possible.” Vax murmurs, looking at his scarlet flecked face. “The threads grow easier to snap, with tests. Keep playing with your own, and I will be forced to take what I do not wish to cut. But I would not have that for you.”

He descends from the window, hair curtaining them in, as he kisses the boy’s forehead. With gentle fingers he lifts the tortured arms that have bled so much, and pours the small well of divinity he has into them. They stitch and heal, barely mended, still on the hair’s edge of failing. But it will suffice. It will preserve enough.

“Have hope, little one,” he whispers gently, drawing back to look at the broken eyes pleading with him. “This despair is not the only future ahead of you. You will feel again.”

“Promise?” The boy whispers, with the naked trust of a little child.

“I give my word.” The Champion vows. “Your path has a confluence.”

“It’s just so hard.” The boy complains tiredly, his hand falls from the Champion’s coming to rest against his blood spattered shirt. “Just so hard...so hard...”

“Open your eyes, and I will call it worship enough.” The Champion says imperiously, straightening up to sit tall in the window once again. “One day, each day, for me. You wake for me.”

“I will try.” The boy says, hollow but compliant.

“That is all I ask.” The Champion says. “Open your eyes tomorrow. That is your gift to me.”

With that he pulls away. Around him expands, or else Material shrinks, and once more he’s looking at the All. Bren’s blood is stayed, the life is spared, and a nurse stumbles on his body soon enough to save it.

***

The third time he visits this thread about to snap, it’s with a heavy heart, and frustrated resignation. He is not angry. The continued existence of this boy’s life does not weigh on him so heavily that he would be truly angry at his passing. But pity for the despair that calls him again and again is something he can feel and ache for. It is quietly pathetic, how this boy succumbs to weakness.

When the Champion opens his eyes on the Inner Plane, he finds himself outdoors for the first time. The trees, made blurred and watery by how far they are away from the crossing point, are frozen in wind tossed shapes, still as cutouts in a puppet theatre. The same frozen, unseen, unfelt wind has caught stationary autumn leaves into the air, which hang motionless like fixed objects. On the periphery of his frozen reality the Champion can look up to see a featureless tower, that vanishes into utter white at the edges of his available vision.

The boy lies broken at the foot of it. Vax comes to himself, crouching over the figure, the shadow silhouettes of his hidden wings thrown across the stones and over the boy by the backlight of an unseen noonday sun. The boy is truly more like a man now. The hair on his head has grown past his shoulders, long enough to graze his shoulder blades if he were standing up. In the same way his beard is thick, long and uncut, disfiguring and obscuring what The Champion knows was once a handsome face. The body which lies so broken is even thinner than Vax remembers, no longer just pale, but gone farther to become almost translucent. The boy is a collection of fleshless arms, protruding ribs, knobby knees, and sunken cheeks.

But his eyes, closed as if in sleep, are just the same. Bruised and shadowed, and hollow beneath his brows.

“We can’t keep doing this, little one.” The Champion says affectionately, a smile on his lips.

The boy opens his eyes and looks up at him. The manic energy of their last meeting is gone, the comfortless grief of still further back as well. It’s a peaceful face that finds The Champion’s, empty blue eyes become listless and still. Vax caresses back the red hair trailing across his forehead, exposing the narrow, white temples that are prematurely hollow.

“I was lonely.” The boy says in explanation, and even though the vocal quality of his timbre is rough and uncertain from disuse, the impression behind his speech is as calm and mild as his tired eyes have become.

_Was_. It’s a small word to carry such importance, but Vax tilts his head curiously as he notes its use. _Was lonely_. A strange way to seek out human connection, calling for attention from a denizen of the Matron’s influence. Seeking death for the comfort of conversation.

“I’ve done what you said.” The boy declares, gazing up at him, and there’s a passing touch of pride in the claim. “I do my worship. Every morning.”

“I shouldn’t be here then.” The Champion says with an arch and knowing look.

The boy shrugs. It’s a gesture that neither acknowledges or denies the point, and he falls quiet, still just looking up at The Champion’s face.

“Your thread’s getting fragile.” Vax says somberly, looking down at him.

“I know,” the boy answers, something solemn and almost apprehensive in his face. “I think I can feel it.”

“If you’re going to force my hand, then the choice is near before you. I can’t keep pulling you back.” Vax warns, though it seems increasingly unclear whether the words will be heeded.

“I don’t want to fail you,” the boy says. “It’s just, I don’t have anyone to talk to. You’re the only one.” He turns over one fractured arm, as if unaware of the injuries on it, their fixed meeting point keeping him inoculated from physical pain. “Even He hasn’t come in a long time.”

Vax shakes his head. “This pocket corporeal is not my place. I cannot linger.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” The boy asks, then hastens on when he sees the Champion opening his mouth with a frown. “I know that you will not give what I want.” He smiles forlornly up at the Champion’s pale face. “I meant, whatever you would choose to offer.”

The Champion cocks his head, intrigued by the phrasing. It does pique his interest. “Maybe.” He says diffidently. “In truth I do not know the answer.”

“I’m weak, _Gevatter_.” The boy confesses offhandedly, grown as passive with that truth as everything else he speaks. “I made a promise to keep, but I think I need help to keep it.”

The Champion hums, acknowledging his confession without words, and caressing his thin forehead rhythmically.

“Perhaps I can aid you.” Vax agrees. “But it will not be in a form that unchains your mind. Such meddling is not my skill, nor my place, beyond these borders.” Glancing at their frozen surroundings that vanish into white at the edges.

“Then I won’t ask for it,” the boy says simply. “I just...” he seems to wince, a twitch of pain or some other reflex passing rapidly across his face. “A friend, _Gevatter_.” He whispers, “Just don’t leave me alone.”

“I will aid. As I can...However, I must warn you,” the Champion says, demeanor growing stern. “You _cannot_ test your thread in this way again. Next time we meet, it will be final, no matter the circumstances.”

“Yes.” The boy says submissively. “I will remember.”

“See that you do.” Vax warns. “You have used all your second chances.”

He reaches out to touch the boy, once again calling on his small store of healing to stave off the passing. It is not nearly enough, with the numerous and grievous wounds which must be treated, but the fatalities are pushed out of reach. It will hold him. Barely.

“Thank you.” The boy says when Vax’ildan is done.

“You are most welcome, little one.” The Champion says soberly. “For the last time.”

“Yes.” The boy says, even as the Champion vanishes away.

Then time restarts, the wind regains its momentum, and a broken boy starts bleeding on the stones. Strangers in uniforms come running toward the disaster, chaos is thrown into motion around the half dead figure. Life is a matter of splinting bones, and sewing flesh, and sponging away quarts of blood. But the boy lives. Miraculously. Divinely. Unexpectedly. 

But he lives.

***

It happens so quick Caleb almost doesn’t feel it.

Almost.

The singe of fire is still burning in his hands, like lightning bugs under the fingertips. A huge swath of ice in front of him has been melted down slick and mirror flat, razed but a cone of the hottest fire he’s ever summoned, and the stink of charred flesh is hanging on the air. For a moment he’s almost giddy with it: that intoxicating taste of power that comes from unleashing himself, from being in the direct middle of combat, a brute force player in the conflict, which he so rarely gets to taste from taking potshots at the rear. He’s right in the middle of everything, up close and involved with all the action, and it’s exciting in the way he sees Beau get high on being their front-liner.

It’s too close really. He’s too close to danger, and he knows it—he’s no Beauregard—but for that half second of looking at his work he’s pleased with himself, and it feels good. 

That’s when the tail comes. 

The blow from behind makes his head snap backward before his entire body pitches forward, and he finds himself gasping on his knees with the breath knocked out of him and his vision gone woozy. He’s coughing from the strength of the blow, and his ribs feel ten sizes too small, while the mass of his brain feels ten sizes too big.

Then he feels a ripping agony like being split in half, and for a moment nothing else exists but white noise and shock. When he blinks he’s looking at blood spatters spraying from his mouth, and instead of too small his ribs feel like they’re gone entirely, replaced by pain of a such a magnitude he’s gone past agonized into numb. He looks down to find out what’s happened, and there’s a blood smeared white claw punctured right through where the bottom of his chest should be. (Diaphragm, his hyperactive brain supplies helpfully). He blinks again and he’s looking at Yasha, and the horrified expression on her face makes him think that maybe something terrible has just happened.

That’s not good. He should try to think of a solution.

If there is one, his entire world lurches before he can think of it. The claw he’s anchored around (or is it anchored in him? He’s not sure of the exact terminology) scrapes him sideways, like a rag doll being dragged across the ground. He blinks and for a moment he’s airborne, and there’s nothing to orient himself, as even the claw disappears from his chest. Then his back impacts with a solid mass behind him, where he remembers an ice wall being earlier in the battle. His chest is back apparently, as it’s decided to crack under the force of the impact like a cage of brittle matchsticks, and he feels it crush into fragments. Once again his head snaps back on his neck, this time a split second behind the rest of his momentum, and his entire world goes white again as his skull impacts with ice.

He blinks one more time, and there’s a dark, lanky figure crouching in front of him, where he’s slumped down at the foot of the wall, enormous black wings unfurling from the figure’s shoulder blades to consume everything else. The stranger tilts their head on one side, long silky black hair spilling over their shoulder like ink, and a cold grin sharpens the edge of their mouth.

“Well.” They say, and in the uttering of that one word Caleb suddenly understands _everything_. “Looks like you’ll finally get what you want after all.”

The Stranger reaches forward, a ice cold thumb and forefinger closing around a frayed golden thread that pulls somewhere from in Caleb’s chest, and the Wizard only has time to shout out “ _NO_ —“ before the half-elf pulls on it so hard it snaps.

Everything goes blinding white and final, the ice, the battle, the pain, his companions, the Reaper all disappearing in one surge of overpowering brightness. His sight returns to find grayness, eyes darting to take in his new situation almost before he’s cleared his mind of the light that just surged through it. They don’t appear to be anywhere in particular, and he can’t see anything. It’s just smoky dimness, dark like the blackest storm clouds but everywhere, and the occult Stranger sitting cross legged before him.

“No!” Caleb spits. “Why did you do that!”

He surges to his feet, pacing to the left and then the right, trying in vain to penetrate the foggy darkness around and above and beneath them, restive for a form of escape that doesn’t appear. The Stranger watches him struggle with eerie calm, pale and impassive at the center of it all. There’s no reason for Caleb to be sure that the Stranger really is the absolute center, but for some reason he is, even though there are no landmarks or defining features to indicate any definite directions or distances in the nothingness around them. Somehow the half-elf is the focal point of the void anyway, like a child sitting in the center of a large blanket the Stranger’s crossed legs pin this reality beneath his weight.

Inevitably, Caleb returns to the point from which he started, glaring down on the figure at his feet. “You have to send me back.”

“I think you know I am not capable of that.”

“I don’t know what you’re capable of.” Caleb bites back, because frustration is making him sarcastic.

His venom doesn’t appear to move the Stranger much, or disturb him in any great way. The man merely stretches, his lithe white arms moving gracefully, and Caleb catches a snapshot of his wings again. They’re hidden once more, but this time not because they’re merely invisible. Instead of seeing their shadows move across illuminated surfaces, it’s like seeing the physical wings, but they’re the size of a titan’s. They’re so immense they dominate the entire sky above them and are almost hidden by the fog, unless the Stranger moves and they shift through the clouds like two vast black creatures of their own. Caleb finds himself taking an instinctive half step back, intimidated and put on guard at the sight of them.

“I remember a time when you would have thanked me for this,” the Stranger says when he’s settled, and his wings have become hidden by the dimness once more. He tilts his head, and Caleb remembers with sudden vividness how the Stranger always used to look at him in that poised, curious way. “It seems you’ve changed your mind.”

“ _Ja_ , well. I wasn’t myself then.” Caleb says uneasily.

“And what is Myself?” The Stranger asks, still with that bright, bird-like, otherworldly interest. “Are you any more Yourself than you were then? The choices you made are not what you would make now.”

Caleb finds his tongue empty of an answer. The half-elf’s strangeness only makes him more uncomfortable the longer he’s near it, disturbed by a sense of being in the presence of someone—or maybe even something—that understands concepts which are hidden from him. In a word he feels ignorant, and the feeling unnerves him. Finally he relents, and chooses to simply acknowledge it. “I don’t know,” he says honestly.

The Stranger nods, accepting his confession. “Time is mysterious like that.” He says, like he’s making a gracious allowance. “I see you have not fathomed the mysteries of it.”

“Will I, in the future?” Caleb asks, trying not to betray his eagerness. “I remember you knowing things about my future before.”

“How can I tell?” The half-elf says, seeming guarded and unfriendly for the first time in their conversation. “Fate is fickle. There is much that yet May Be, that does not become what Is. Nothing is assured, but what is Past. You know this,” he says gesturing at Caleb as if to indicate all of him, “I have seen you catch a glimpse of it.”

“The Beacons.” Caleb says, realizing what the Stranger means. “So that endless possibility is what the future looks like?”

“A version of it.” The Stranger moderates. “They’re a clumsy way to capture the Truth, but they hold a shadow of it.”

His answers are frustratingly vague. Caleb wants to snap at him again, galled by the ambivalence. No sooner has the Stranger seemed to share a hidden truth, than he contradicts his own words with another confusing statement. It’s irritating.

“I said that Time is mysterious.” There’s a hint of laughter in the half-elf’s voice, as if he knows what Caleb is thinking. “No mortal can understand it fully.”

“So I see, and hear.” Caleb says dryly.

“I _can_ say that you will know one day,” the Stranger amends after a moment’s reflection. “Whether that will happen before, or after you reach Eternal, I cannot say. But you will be enlightened one way or another.”

“You mean if I die first.” The wizard deadpans.

“As you choose to call it. The one thing Time cannot alter is that all souls Pass. Time ensures it.”

Caleb falls silent, ruminating on the Reaper’s words. The Stranger watches him, making no move to interrupt the silence himself, and a deep quiet hangs between them.

“I sensed you. That day.” The wizard says abruptly, starting on a new topic without context.

The Stranger tilts his head again, as if he’s listening for the rest.

“That fight.” Caleb tries to explain. Hurriedly he throws himself to his knees, taking a seat across from the half-elf, and leaning toward him with a manic restlessness “When it all went wrong, and we lost. I knew what was going to happen before it did. I remember anticipating it.”

The half-elf’s dark eyes spark with understanding, and he shifts in his seat, dark wings sliding across the sky again. “Such things happen, with fragile threads.”

“I remember trying to convince myself it wasn’t real afterwards. I couldn’t understand how I would know. And I didn’t want it to be real.” He shivers, looking at the ground between them. “If I knew, I should have stopped it. I could have saved him.”

“That, you can’t know for certain.” The Stranger says, shaking his head. For a moment he just looks at the wizard’s downcast face before him, something almost affectionate and fond coming into his flint black eyes. “You are no more a fortune teller than He.”

Caleb brings his eyes up to look at the Stranger. Some of the empty blue has come back, draining them of life, like they used to be fractured. “I didn’t want you to be real.” He whispers, and he shudders again, petting himself on the arms restlessly. “I wanted to say I’d only imagined you.”

“A grim truth of the Self to acknowledge, if I was real.” The Stranger agrees.

“ _Ja. Ja._..” Caleb says, nodding blindly. The soothing motions turn into itching for a moment, fingernails biting into the edges of scarred flesh with a suggestion to them of digging deeper, of clawing harder. Then he exhales raggedly and forces himself to untangle his hands. “A grim truth, as you say.”

“I’ve been with you for a long time.” The Stranger says quietly, and the paternal affection of those words make Caleb shrink more than any of the others.

“I know.” He rasps.

An almost tender smile softens the half-elf’s lips, and the wings above them shift again. This time curling inwards like hands, until they’re clearly visible though the fog, and their enormity looms around him, an oppressive cocoon that dwarfs and shelters him both at once. For a moment they seem close enough to touch the back of Caleb’s neck, making him shiver with the ghost of a sensation, then they withdraw in the silent way they appeared.

“Can you go away, if I ask?” Caleb asks in a small childish voice, glancing at the figure before him. It’s not a question of the present moment, and the Stranger seems to take it that way, understanding how it refers to the future.

“How could I?” He responds with that cold crooked smile. “I cannot withdraw. You worship me.”

Caleb sighs, nodding as if he expected the answer. “So I am stuck with you.”

“All mortals are.”

“ _Ja_ , but the situations are not quite the same I think.”

“No they’re not.”

“So what happens, if I’m not resurrected in the end?” Caleb asks, trying to rouse himself. “Will I belong to the Raven Queen somehow? Does she have an afterlife for her followers?”

“You will Pass Beyond.” The Stranger answers obtusely. “Your understanding will be Broadened, and you will see whatever it is you are meant to see.”

“That is not very helpful.”

“You are Small.” The Stranger says with an indulgent smile “Grow to match me, and you will see what I mean.”

Caleb shrugs, giving up on that confusing line of questions. “Will it hurt?” He asks instead, returning them to concrete things. Not that he’s afraid of the pain. Caleb would like to think he’s experienced enough of it to be prepared, but prior knowledge of what’s coming has always served him better than no expectations at all.

“No.” The Stranger says simply. “You have passed beyond the part that hurts.”

“How long will it take? I assume this is some in between state.”

“We will linger for as long as you need to make your final choice.”

“Which is?”

“Your loved ones have been calling, and whether you will answer them.”

“They’ve been trying to bring me back this whole time and you didn’t even tell me?” Caleb demands indignantly, anger flashing through him once again. “You’ve been wasting the duration! How long do I have left?!?”

“We are on the edge of Eternity here.” The Stranger says, with that half mocking laugh. “You have more Time than you could ever possibly want.”

And when Caleb pauses to listen, he sort of sees what the Reaper means. He’s suddenly aware of familiar voices, immeasurably distant but audible right in his ear. Then he becomes retroactively aware that he’s been hearing them this whole time. His friends, his family, entreating whatever incorporeal part of him is suspended here to return. And in that moment all the Stranger’s terms for dying make sense. It _is_ a Doorway, a Passage, and his feet are planted in the middle, arrested in the portal Between.

Listening harder Caleb can make out Veth’s voice, and he lets it’s words flow over him for a second before really taking in what she’s saying. Then what he does hear yanks at him, sharp and insistent, overwhelmed by something fierce, and loyal, and nameless that chants _Veth, Veth, Veth_. The longer he listens the more compelled he is to search out the source of their voices, to obey the call that he can now feel tugging at him. He has to go back. He hasn’t passed through the Door yet, he can still return. Something in him flutters, weak and strained, like a feeble bird beating at a cage. It feels like they’re so far away, so impossible to reach, but the urge is there, the desire to scale that mountain.

Unconsciously he’s scrambled to his feet, panting for breath, eyes straining against the cloudy dimness as if he can pierce it by wishing hard enough. He wants to run into it, wants to smash straight through it, but his restless feet remain planted while he listens. Beau’s voice has joined Veth’s, and somehow it’s coming after Veth’s has fallen silent, but he can hear them both regardless. They mingle, and join, and harmonize on each other. The thin, parched, wailing voice of some pathetically weak creature is crying out piteously inside of him, stirred into feeble life by the spell that’s calling on it.

It’s at this moment that Caleb is suddenly certain that he’s almost crippled by weakness. All the Stranger’s warnings confront him in his head, and he realizes how sickly and damaged his thread is. His life force is almost powerless, drained by brushes with death that have tested its strength again, and again, and again. He might not have the ability to revive, even if he wants to, and a new well of anxiety yawns open to claim him at that realization.

He wants to wake up.

“I need to go!” He stammers to the Stranger, feverish with impatience. “I’m so weak already! Before I fade any further.”

“You forget that it’s a Choice.” The Reaper intones somberly, watching him fret with cold poise.

Instantly Caleb’s attention is claimed by other voices, other urges, and these are _much_ closer. He staggers to a halt, trembling with emotion, as ever fiber of him vibrates to a new siren song. These voices are so familiar, dearer than his friend’s could ever be. He hears no words this time, but somehow the wordless call is much more akin to him. Much more attuned to what his life force is becoming. They’re alike.

Dead, calling to almost dead.

It’s all wordlessly communicated images, emotions, memories. While Veth and Beau bargain with promises of the future, reminders of the present; those Beyond speak a language of Eternal Past. No more struggle, no more toil, no more agonizing change of shape. Whatever lies on the other side of the Door is stable, unchanging. A final form of cemented choices that have been made and left behind.

If it is a choice, it hardly seems like it. The Nein are still calling. Veth, Beau—Jester has joined them—still there on one side of him. But they’re inconsequential, barely audible from their impossible distance. This path is much closer, much clearer. If he Passes it would be right, would be natural. If he leaves them, they’ll find someone else to complete their group, to fill a place beside his empty one. Somehow he inconvertibly knows this. They’ll continue to thrive without him.

So the choice is perfectly clear.

He takes a step toward the Stranger. The half-elf has risen to his feet now, making no move to invite or discourage the human who takes another stumbling step forward. The Stranger just waits, cold tranquility resting on his face.

_NO_! A pulse of desperation that feels like Jester tugs at him. A blast of cinnamon sugar wafts across his back, bringing him to a halt again. And nothing has changed from before, his reasoning is all the same as it was, but he’s filled by sudden reluctance again.

He looks searchingly into the Reaper’s dark midnight eyes, and suddenly understands him. “ _A manumission from choices_.” The Stranger called himself. And Caleb suddenly understands what’s truly at stake. The chance to change, to make choices and grow. To exist in Time, with all its restrictions, and heartache, and uncertainty, and accumulate moments of transience that define him. His life may continue beyond the Door, but the ability to fashion and form himself will not. He will be Timeless, unchangeable.

Eternal. Just as the Reaper says.

“A final choice, just as you said.” He gives a melancholy smile to the Stranger.

“The most important one.”

“Can you tell me what happens if I stay?”

“No.” The Stranger says. “Only that Time will find out.”

Caleb shuts his eyes, trying to center himself. He pushes the voices to recede again, and for a moment there’s just perfect stillness. Then he opens his eyes, and finds the half-elf looking back at him.

“What shall be, little one?” The Stranger croons, dark eyes full of possessiveness again.

A manumission from choices...

  
  


Not yet.

“Send me back.”

The Stranger tips his head to the side, a tiny smile of intrigue touching at the corners of his mouth. “You truly have changed, little one.” He says, and the edges of the grayness are turning white. Shining oblivion is rushing up to claim the wizard, like the tides of an immaterial sea, and the Stranger’s last words ring through it all. “You’re closer to Myself than ever...”

Everything goes white. The Stranger, the Grayness, the vast black wings. All vanishes away.

And very far off, somewhere very small, a man who has long been more than half dead, re-enters Time. And starts to draw breath. In Time he’ll wake, and in Time he’ll walk. But for now he’s weak—as much of soul as in body—overtaxed by the effort of revival, and he doesn’t know the time that is passing while he sleeps. The man’s friends weep over his slumbering form, and hold strict vigil while they wait for him to wake up. And outside, in the Endless Night, a Champion sits. And watches the threads of fate unravel.

***  
  


Their charges knows things, they say. Many of the madmen in their care have something strange about them. A weird shadow of revelation. When they’re lucid enough—or perhaps just the opposite—to give voice to whatever incomprehensible visions illuminate and fracture them, their reality transcends the order of those more sane. The mad know things.

Perhaps they’re just crazy enough to see what’s too real for everyone else, the nurses whisper to each other with frightened faces. Maybe they’ve gone so mad they’ve come back to being sane again, the orderlies joke with each other, trying to hide their reluctance to touch the people they speak of. A gift for being mad. A boon for being broken.

Bren is no different.

“What’s that one doing over there? Should he even be in here?” Jaken asks his trainer, nodding at the red headed man sitting by one of the infirmary windows

They’ve been going ward by ward, giving the new caretaker a day to observe and adjust to each space, and get to know all the different supervisors. They’d started on the ground floor of course, with the low security patients. The ones they mostly trust to be let outside, that can dress, and feed themselves. After that was the second floor, with the violent, or highly demanding patients; and now they’re on the medical wing. Where the sick are tended, either in illness, or in the aftermath of the infamous experiments which makes _Vergesson’s_ inmates so valuable. Not that Jaken’s been allowed to see any.

He remembers the redhead from the second floor though, with his vacant blue eyes, and uncanny stillness. He wasn’t one of the violent ones, only dull and incompetent, and at the time Jaken had been puzzled to comprehend why they even bothered keeping him in a straitjacket. The buckled arms had seemed like a bit of an overkill honestly. It wasn’t like he was about to make any fuss for himself.

“Oh him.” Allan says, with a careless glance at the shrunken figure sitting by one of the unattended patients. “He’s nothing.” Seeing Jaken’s confusion, he goes on. “That’s just Bren. They let him come and go as he pleases here. You’ll get used to him, _I_ don’t even notice him anymore.”

“But why? Isn’t that a security breach or something? What if he started talking to people about—“

“Now you listen here,” Allan snarls, cutting him off. “First of all: that vacant idiot over there is one of the Assembly’s golden specimens. His board could pay your entire month’s wages, so don’t tamper with him. And second of all: there’s nothing for him to tell people about.”

Appropriately intimidated, Jaken only nods and the older worker lets him go.

“You could learn a thing or two from Bren.” Allan says, once more speaking conversationally. He strolls over to the man in question, placing an almost paternal hand on the top of his rumpled head. Only at this close range does it become clear that the redhead is mumbling under his breath, too soft and slurred to understand “Bren here hasn’t spoken a coherent word to anyone in years. Almost a decade actually. Good at keeping secrets aren’t you.” Allan bends down to occupy the space where Bren’s vacant eyes rest, and grins at his unseeing face.

“I still don’t understand why he’s in here.” Jaken says, a little sullenly.

“Superstition,” Allan scoffs. “The nurses are mystical about him. Say that he can see the future or something like that. He comes and goes as he pleases, and if he gives things to the patients, they let him sit with them, and stop taking care of the person. According to them, it’s a sign that Bren knows someone’s about to die.”

“And do they? Die I mean.”

“Of course not.” Allan says scornfully. “He’s just a harmless old nutcase with one too many screws loose, and the only reason people die around him is because the goddamn nurses take his word for it and let the patients die when he associates with them. It’s just simple correlation, Jaken.”

Jaken laughs, and is appropriately superior to it all, as Allan leads him away. But it doesn’t last when something collides with Jaken’s back as they turn to leave. Bren is there, still mumbling and not looking at either of them, but he’s clutching something in his hand where it’s muffled by the jacket. He makes an aborted movement, as if meaning to give it to Allan, but only succeeds in shoulder checking him, and the object—a half rotted pinecone—drops on the floor.

“Fuck off with your trash.” Allan blusters derisively, shoving the frightened patient away.

Bren stumbles back, muttering more hysterically now, and jerking against his buckled restraints as if he wants to undo them, with a distressed, pained expression. Careless of the disturbance he’s made in the madman’s vacant stupor, Allan leaves, still growling about the insolence of his behavior. But Jaken stops long enough to pick up the pinecone where it’s fallen to the side forgotten.

Bren is still mumbling to himself as Jaken leaves, rocking back and forth and fretting at his restraints. But while Jaken watches a large, glossy black raven swoops down to perch outside the windowsill where Bren is standing, unnoticed by the gibbering patient. And surely there’s nothing of foreboding omen about an ordinary raven, but the way it looks at the unseeing Bren is strangely intelligent, and Jaken can’t help the shudder that runs over him as he leaves.

The shudder becomes an outright, steadfast aversion, when the news comes that Allan is dead, two weeks later. Jaken believes the superstitious nurses after that.

**Author's Note:**

> Some tidbits of interest at the end:
> 
> Vax’s voice, and expressions, and even mannerisms are very OOC for our beloved Vax’ildan of Campaign One. But I decided to take my cue and inspiration from his demeanor in the Wedding Oneshot, where Vax was VERY different from how he used to be. At the time it kind of upset and disappointed me, because I love and missed him so much, and wanted him to return as his old self however briefly. I feel like writing him so mystical here helped me make peace with it more. I Headcanoned that being exposed to the Outer Planes has completely changed Vax on a very fundamental level. He’s really not even Human, or Mortal, anymore in this fic. And that was fun to play with. 
> 
> According to the Internet (hur hur 🤓) Gevatter is a very old? Stuffy? Archaic term for someone. I decided to have Bren continue to call Vax that because it had already been referenced once, I was reasonably sure of it’s translation, and it not seeming glaringly out of place. It was closest I could get to something that felt more like a name than just a word for Death or Grim Reaper. If there is some word for Death in German that has a more personal feel I’d be happy to substitute it?
> 
> For those of you that might have suspected: yes! They were fighting Gelidon in the battle where Caleb is killed. And yes, because I am a nerd, he technically died by three failed death saves, which Gelidon automatically expended with continued attacks to Caleb’s body after Zero. Basically Gelidon wacked him with their tail, which brought Caleb to Zero, stomped on him and impaled a front claw through his chest, which took two Death Saves, then threw him against a wall which took his last one. I know that technically Caleb would have been unconscious during that segment, but I like to DM my games with the characters lucid—but incapacitated—while bleeding out. More role play opportunities that way. 
> 
> Same thing with the resurrection ritual. I was observing Matt’s rules of multiple deaths making revival increasingly difficult, and the weakness Caleb was feeling basically translated to a really high DC for Jester.
> 
> Finally, I don’t know if it was clear, but basically Vax’s way of aiding Bren was visiting him with ravens every day like he does (I am _adamant_ on this!) for Keyleth; and giving him the ability to perceive/interact with Vax’s influence when near the dying. For this reason Bren is prophetically attracted to deathbeds, and talks to the air when near them. Though the translated phrases heard by any sane person would only be perceived as “word salad”


End file.
